Video: Increasingly Powerful, Increasingly Important.

If you offer video on your site do you track:* by device and/or device type and/or OS?* percentage of page viewers who play a video?---by device and/or device type and/or OS?* percentage of video that is watched?---by device and/or device type and/or OS?* conversion, in whole or in part, via video?* etc.

Do you integrate your calls to action to leverage/mitigate any/all of the above?

Did you know (you do now ) that the longer the video the larger the screen that viewers prefer to watch on? And that for vids over 10-minutes twice as many console viewers, compared to desktop, watch to completion. That ~12% (and growing rapidly) of US households watch web content on their TV screen via consoles. That ~15% of XBox and PS3 and ~33% of Wii usage is streaming online video...Supplementary: if your audience includes significant numbers likely to own consoles are you engaging them with longer presentations? Are your longer vids targeting that audience market segment?

Further, did you know that tablet users view almost a third more videos than desktop users? And they watch the entire thing almost a third more often than desktop viewers and view 75% of a vid more than twice as often...

But, also a way to annoy your users. I dislike video presentations. Great if the video adds something but I don't want someone reading text to me that I could read to myself in half the time, and go back and find a reference without watching the whole thing again. If you are presenting a video, offer a text alternative. I was looking at software the other day, I can't remember which company it was (so they obviously did a rubbish job) but I wanted to know what the features included... only way to find out - watch a video presentation. I left the site instead. So yes, it can be awesome but don't forget the users that aren't watching it.

Your point about providing a transcript (with images) and/or slide deck and/or other possible info serving alternative for video on one's own site is critical for maximum user engagement and conversion.

A complimentary point is that incorporating close captioning and/or described video into video serves a double purpose: (1) makes the offering usable by another 10-20% of the population and (2) may, in some situations, reinforce the message/brand/what have you.

I'll repeat your closing comment as it is exceeding important to remember:...don't forget the users that aren't watching it.

Most aren't. People -- including the ones who purport to tell you how to use video on the web -- lag behind remedial basics established a half century or more ago. This would be expected were there no movie industry, and no exposure to it. This is not the case.

With shockingly rare exception, online video still believes in internet exeptionalism. To the dreary point of thinking video is way better than the animated GIF, rather than horrible in comparison to the worst of TV and movie making.

Take Flash. What people are doing with Flash is completely divorcing special effects from any sense of storytelling ...and in most cases any communications whatsoever. Even worse than the worst criticisms of effects laden movies. And design forums are drooling over it as a best practice.

Good storytelling about shlock storytelling.

Think moving this to HTML5/CSS3 and Jquery changes anything? Nope. (Except, unlike Flash, the thing will only play in the more advanced modern browsers.) You'd expect way, way, way more from people who torrent the things enough to throw the movie industry into a tizzy.